Ilya Ivanov: The Ape-Man Experiment and the Soviet “New Human” Story

In 1926, the Soviet government funded biologist Ilya Ivanov's trip to French Guinea in West Africa. He was not travelling for an ordinary animal survey. Ivanov intended to use artificial insemination to create a human–great ape hybrid. In the years that followed, the project became a dark rumour: the Soviet state did not simply want to test a biological question. It wanted to make a new kind of human, free of religion, without an independent will, and usable as an instrument of the state.

What separates this story from many secret-laboratory tales is that its people, dates and funding leave records. Ivanov was born in 1870 and was a specialist in artificial insemination and cross-species breeding in animals. He used the technique in animal husbandry before speaking about apes and humans. In 1910, at the World Congress of Zoologists in Graz, Austria, he publicly raised the possibility of a human-ape hybrid through artificial insemination. The idea was not attached to him decades later. It was a research direction he announced himself before the Africa expedition.